We are all more conscious than we have been at any time in recent memory of how we live at the mercy of the nation’s shortcomings, moral and otherwise. The other hypothesis I put forward, prior to reading the new sequels, was that we are at a stage in history when people feel threatened by social upheaval.
Why, I wondered, have writers shown such interest lately in continuing a narrative that dates to 1884? We are not approaching a Huck Finn centennial. Still, I was taken aback when it dawned on me at my local library that no fewer than three sequels to Huck Finn had been published in the last three years. If they haven’t read it because they wanted to, they were probably forced to read it in school. It is a book that does not recede with time, a classic that does not meet Twain’s description of “something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read,” because lots of people have read it. Huck Finn is not just any novel it is an American epic, if there ever has been one. Other writers since Twain have adopted his characters as their own and put them to work in new sequels to Huck Finn-and it’s no mystery why. They are more Die Hard 2 than Gremlins 2, more Jaws: The Revenge than The Empire Strikes Back. Both seem to have been written more out of a sense of obligation or need for money than an interest in expanding on or altering readers’ perception of the original. Neither sequel brings much to the Tom and Huck franchise that wasn’t there already. In Tom Sawyer, Detective, Tom and Huck solve the mystery of a lost twin and missing diamond. The surviving trio takes the balloon to Egypt and sees the Sphinx. The professor becomes unhinged, so in order to save the others, Tom murders him. They climb aboard the balloon, and its inventor, a professor, takes them on an unplanned trip across the United States and the Atlantic Ocean. In Tom Sawyer Abroad, Tom, Huck, and Jim see a hot-air-balloon exhibition. Huck narrates both of Twain’s finished sequels. Previously, he’d begun a third installment, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians. The other was Tom Sawyer, Detective, published two years later. Mark Twain published two sequels to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
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